Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” said Mr. Carter. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”
On Tuesday, December 31, 2024, The New York Times contained a special section that saluted the life of former president Jimmy Carter. Carter, who died on Sunday, December 29th, was one hundred years old. He served as President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. The quotation above, which I found in a separate article in The Times, is an excerpt from what came to be known as Carter's "Malaise Speech." You can click right here if you'd like to read the text, or if you'd like to listen to or see Carter deliver the speech.
"Malaise" is not a common word. It is not a word that often pops into one's mind as one searches for a term that accurately describes how one feels about how things are going. Carter did not, himself, use the word "malaise" as a way to convey his message. Here is a definition of "malaise," from Merriam-Webster:
1. An indefinite feeling of debility or lack of health, often indicative of or accompanying the onset of an illness.
2. A vague sense of mental or moral ill-being.
The way I read it, Carter's speech did not express an "indefinite" feeling, nor was his description "vague." In fact, Carter was pretty direct and focused in his remarks, as you can see from the quotation above. Carter urged Americans to consume less, and to find meaning not in material things, but in human relationships.
Carter's speech provided us with some good advice. In fact, the observations he made in that speech, and that I have quoted at the top of this blog posting, are more on point than ever. As families start paying off their Christmas credit card bills, which are the result of an idea that any time of celebration demands more "things," we might want to revisit the ideas that Carter was trying to convey: "Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”
If you read the entire speech, which ultimately confronted the nation's "energy crisis," you will find Carter urging the nation to start burning more coal, which he identified as "our most abundant energy source." Obviously, the consequences of global warming were not yet well understood back then. Still, note the picture. Carter installed solar panels on the White House. They were removed by the next president, Ronald Reagan.
Carter's speech was less about energy policy than it was about how we were doing, as a nation, in meeting the challenges and opportunities that faced us then. Those challenges and opportunities haven't changed very much since Carter's time, but I'd say that it is clearer than ever how important it is that we stop pursuing the policies that suggest that more money and things can solve our problems.
As William Galston said in The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial column published on the same day that The Times published its tribute to Carter, "A New Year Isn't A Blank Slate." It's not. As Galston noted, we don't live in an "Etch A Sketch" world. The momentum of the past is pushing us forward, carrying us, ever more rapidly, in the direction we are already heading. Climate collapse, environmental destruction, nuclear war, and increasing poverty for the poor, and increasing wealth for the rich, are what we know we're heading for.
If we want to go in some different direction, we're going to have to change what we do.
Carter then, and Galston now, are urging us to make some changes. Me, too!
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